GELATO Federation Marks First Year by Doubling Membership

CHAMPAIGN, IL — Overwhelming interest in running Linux on Itanium processors has helped to double membership in the Gelato Federation to 20 institutions. Gelato is a worldwide collaborative research community of universities, national laboratories and industry sponsors that is dedicated to providing scalable, open-source tools, utilities, libraries and applications to accelerate the adoption of Linux on Itanium systems.

Gelato was established in the first quarter of 2002 and ended the year with 10 members: Groupe ESIEE (France); the Bioinformatics Institute of Singapore; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the universities of Waterloo (Canada), Illinois, New South Wales (Australia), and Tsinghua (China); the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research (Switzerland); and industry sponsor Hewlett-Packard. As of the end of the first quarter of 2003, eight additional members and an active contributor have joined the ranks. The new members emphasize the decidedly international flavor of the Gelato community:

IPD, the Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization, is part of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), which is consistently ranked as the country's top computer science department. The IPD is a research leader in cluster operating systems, configuration management, software architecture, empirical software engineering, compiler theory, component systems, and software re-engineering.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (USA) is a U.S. Department of Energy multiprogram facility that fulfills key national science and technology objectives in the areas of environment, energy, health, and national security. PNNL is the home of an 11.4-teraflop supercomputer with more than 1,900 Itanium-2 processors.

PDC at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) of Stockholm (Sweden) is the lead center for high-performance computing, storage and visualization for the Swedish academic community. PDC works with research organizations worldwide and European industries with an emphasis on security, systems administration tools, file systems, performance tools and scientific software libraries. PDC is a member of the SweGrid project and a founding member of the Nordic Grid Consortium and the European Grid Support Center.

Ohio Supercomputer Center provides high-performance computing and networking resources for state and national academic, industrial, and government partners. OSC's Cluster Ohio Program redeploys workstations to state researchers with statewide software licensing centered on its HP supercomputer cluster of more than 150 Intel Itanium-2-based HP Workstation zx6000 systems.

ISP, Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is one of Russia's IT leaders. ISP focuses on compiler technologies and optimization; parallel and distributed programming; tools for embedded systems; program analysis, reverse engineering and verification; integration technologies; neural networks and control; and discrete mathematics and numerical analysis.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center provides academic, government and industrial researchers with access to a flexible array of high-performance systems, communications and informatics, including LeMieux, a 3,000-processor HP system capable of 6 teraflops, the most powerful system in the United States that is committed solely to public research in all science and engineering disciplines.

INRIA, the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (France) conducts fundamental and applied research in networks and systems; software engineering and symbolic computation; human-machine interaction, imaging, data, and knowledge; and simulation and optimization of complex systems.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), is a research unit of the University of California, San Diego, and the leading-edge site of the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI). SDSC's mission is to develop and use technology to advance science and to provide leadership both nationally and internationally in computing, data management, biosciences and other areas.

DIKU, the Computer Science Department of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), joins as an Active Contributor member. DIKU conducts research on databases and distributed systems as well as programming analysis, image analysis, music informatics and algorithmic optimization.

Gelato's technical foci are determined by the members and sponsors, and collaborative work is conducted through the Gelato portal, http://www.gelato.org/. Portal activity has tripled in the past two quarters, reflecting the momentum in membership growth. Recent member software made available through the Gelato portal includes two contributions from CERN: GEANT4, a toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter; and CLHEP, a class library for high-energy physics; and one from Gelato Member NCAR: the Spectral Toolkit, a library of multithreaded spectral transforms.

All interested parties are encouraged to visit the portal and participate in the development of Linux on Itanium. Potential new members and sponsors are invited to contact Gelato Managing Director Mark K. Smith at mksmith@gelato.org.